PGA and SAG Awards Begin to Clarify an Unpredictable Awards Season

On Saturday night, the Producers Guild of America gave Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Waterits Best Theatrical Motion Picture award. A few years ago, that might have seemed a good omen for the film. From 2008 through 2015, the PGA awarded what would be the eventual Academy Award winner for Best Picture year after year. In 2016 they threw a wrench into the works as The Big Short took the PGA Award and Spotlight won the Oscar. Last year went similarly, with La La Land winning the PGA Award and Moonlight taking the Oscar.

Generally speaking, the Screen Actors Guild Awards have been more sporadic in their predictability. In the same span of time, the movie honored with the SAG Award for Best Ensemble matched with the Best Picture winner only four times. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s victory Sunday night could be seen as a harbinger of its eventual Oscar domination, or it could end up an odd anomaly, like 2011’s SAG victory for The Help.

Other SAG Award categories have proven more predictive in the past, meaning last night’s wins for Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney could already be locks for Academy Awards. SAG-AFTRA makes up a large enough portion of the Academy’s voting membership that the eventual Oscar winners diverge from SAG Award winners infrequently. That being said, supporting category winners find themselves in a slightly weaker position. It wouldn’t be unusual for the Oscars to nominate an actor unrecognized at the SAGs (e.g. Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained)who actually goes on to take the Oscar.

This year’s awards season remains more peculiar than most.

Every year around this time, the awards season punditry seems to trumpet the same message: The Oscars have never been more unpredictable! And every year, a familiar-looking frontrunner emerges and cleans up in February.Last year’s truly shocking Oscar ceremony was a bungled anomaly, but this year is different. A complicated political moment, an unfamiliar Academy, and a crop of incredibly strong contenders are defining 2018 as the year the Oscars got trulywild.

Preliminary awards like the SAGs and the PGAs have done nothing to clear up the confusion. Two weeks ago, the notorious Golden Globes seemed to crown Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri an industry-loved frontrunner, and last night’s ceremony seemed to reinforce that. There’s a long road ahead, however: finalized Oscar ballots aren’t due for another 37 days.

To complicate the matter, Hollywood is looking for a movie that speaks to this moment in time. All the Money in the Worldgot a boost at the Golden Globes thanks to its last-minute Spacey-scrub reshoots. The sequel to the PGA-nominated Wonder Womanwill be the first movie to conform to the PGA’s newly set anti-sexual harassment guidelines.The Shape of Water is subtitled A Fairy Tale for Troubled Times, possibly the perfect summation of the kind of filmmaking our political moment has fomented. In a year so defined by political upheaval, the race for Best Picture may end up defined by a battle between issues, whether it’s Three Billboards‘ fiery indictment of sexual assaultor Get Out‘s horror-movie take on casual racism.

With the Winter Olympics forcing a more drawn-out timeline than usual, Tuesday’s nominations should shore up narratives and possibly create new ones — it’s not inconceivable that a backlash a la Argo could emerge if Greta Gerwig is denied a Best Director nomination. Moving towards more classically predictive ceremonies like the Directors Guild awards, this season’s ultimate conclusion should start to take form.

Producers Guild of America Award Winners

The Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures: The Shape of Water (Producers: Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale)